The Cinematheque

Romania

Director Serge Ioan Celebidachi’s beautifully wrought drama—last year’s most popular homegrown film in Romania—is a nostalgic tale of lost love and lost causes recalling Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. Deliberately departing from the aesthetics of today’s Romanian New Wave to embrace a more classical style of filmmaking, Octav features noted Romanian actor Marcel Iureș (aged two decades for the part) as an elderly man returning to the countryside of his childhood to reclaim and sell the family home that had been seized by the Communists. Encountering the ghost of his first beloved and a flood of memories, he relives the key events of his youth. Celebidachi’s lush, big-budget movie was shot on 35mm film by veteran Italian cinematographer Blasco Giurato, who also lensed Giuseppe Tornatore’s Oscar-winning Cinema Paradiso.